National Poetry Month — Day 12

I enjoy traveling, most of the time. Rather, I enjoy being on vacation, most of the time. I enjoy experiencing new places. I love it, actually, and wish I did it a lot more often, and the older I get, the more I realize that I wasted a lot of time in my youth not going to other places.

The problem, of course, has to do with the transportation part of things. It’s a fairly complex problem in that it has many layers. But that’s a story about a dilemma for another day.

One thing I know is that I need to start seeing other places — places which are new to me — soon. For my birthday, I put on my wish list:

a passport (because the last time I left the country, when I was in college, all you needed was a birth certificate)

a trip to someplace where I could have an adventure

an adventure worth taking pictures of

I’m making my summer plans now.

One place I will probably not get to this year — but which I would love love love to see — is France. Paris in particular. Since I was little, the place has always held a fascination for me, perhaps because my mother is part French. Le français was the first foreign language I ever had enough real working knowledge of to be practical and useful. I began learning it in earnest, starting with the ad copy on the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast — on a trip to a village near Montréal when I was twelve. Things bloomed from there, and by eleventh grade I was reading Les Misérables in its original and acting in a short French play for academic competitions.

I am aggrieved to say that after a couple of decade with little practice, I now need help to translate with any quick accuracy. Some days it feels I have wasted whole swaths of my life.

Here is the final installment in the “poems inspired by place” series by Adam Holt. I hope you’ve been enjoying these as much as I have. (You can see the first one and the second one here.)

What places have inspired you? I’d love to know about them. Leave your thoughts — including a short poem about them, if you wish — in the comments below.

***

Tour Eiffel: Four Images, Six Lines (Paris, 2013)

A blackboned skeleton dreams of molten blood.
Demigod of a godless age.
Last great structure before reason’s decline.

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THE SHARP EDGES OF WATER

My new collection of poetry is now out from Odeon Press.

FINIS.

The 3rd edition of FINIS. is now out from Odeon Press. Same story, same lovely illustrations by Lauren Taylor, but new back matter including some of my nonfiction and a preview of the next story set in Elsa's world.